


Year 3: Very Far to the South

by Tanist



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Magic Horror Myrning Australia Nullarbor Plain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-10-17 14:27:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17562194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanist/pseuds/Tanist
Summary: When the Rash Illness spread to Australia, even the most remote areas were touched. How might the folk in the wilder parts of the Outback have coped? This is the tale of one of the marngits of the Myrning tribe who inhabit the part of the Nullarbor Plain nearest the Great Australian Bight. The Myrning are a people who even in our day have retained their tradition of magic, and maintain also a tradition of interaction and communication with the great whales of the Bight.





	1. Chapter 1

YEAR 3, VERY FAR TO THE SOUTH

Whatever this new disease was, Warri didn’t like it. It made the land sing wrongly. Sometimes the land stopped singing altogether. Once a few of the animals were infected it didn’t take long for people who came near them to start showing a weird rash. And the tourists spread it - from Spud’s Roadhouse to Mintabie and Coober Pedy, then out onto the Plain. Even one of the weather watchers from Giles had caught it and died, and another had been infected, he had heard, but that one didn’t die - the landspirits told him that the fellow had wandered away from the weather station, raving about voices calling him, then hid in a gully in the range behind the station, where he turned into…… something. None of them recognised what he was now, but the thing he had become was still there, lurking in cover and grabbing other creatures that went near, both the healthy and the infected, adding them to its mass until it was bigger than any animal he had ever heard of, bigger than the elephants in the old movies about Africa. 

The rash reminded him of the smallpox his grandmother had once described, and the measles he had survived as a small child, and of the rashes people grew when the winds blew from where the bombs had been tested back when he was young, but it was different. It felt like no natural disease, not even like what people caught from the poisoned winds from the bombs. Most of the animals and people that caught it just died, but some of them……changed. The things they changed into killed whenever they could, or tried to attack other people and animals, almost as if they were trying to spread the disease.

He had himself been bitten by something that had been a sick child he was tending until it suddenly twisted under his hands and went for his throat. Warri shuddered at that memory. He had crushed the thing’s head, then had to fight off the frantic mother of the little boy it had been. Then he had fled into the wilderness, sick with horror at what he had done. He had expected to die there. But after half a month he was somehow still alive. The bite healed, leaving him with no more than an ugly scar, but the child’s spirit had still cried out to him, and the rituals and songs he would normally have used to settle it into peaceful waiting would not take hold. Then Sun Woman came to him in a dream and taught him the songs he would need to lead the child’s soul to rest. Since then he had rescued the souls of many others of the infected, leading them to the places where they would wait to be reborn into a healthy body. But there were still so very many……

Warri sighed. Memories could wait. Now he had work to do.

************************************************* 

After a night spent with the landspirits, asking their help in setting up a space, he had trailed sand into the spiralling pattern needed for the Dance. He called power into it from the songline, naming each feature of the Plain, calling on the ancestral spirits which inhabited each rock outcrop, spring and cave. The place looked empty to outsiders, he understood, but to him it sang with life. When he looked at it with the sight of the marngits, the barren area vibrated with life, a web of light binding the land together, flowing along the songline like water in those ‘rivers’ he had heard of down south and in the far north, but had only ever seen in the films shown when the travelling picture show passed by the railway work camp every few years, or the ones his granddaughter had insisted he come and watch at her school. The only river he had ever seen for himself was the one that ran underground through the caves below the Plain. The tiny creeks in some of the gullies of the Range didn’t really count as rivers, but they too were part of the web of life. 

He spared a thought for his granddaughter, now nearly a year dead. When she had caught the disease, there had still been hope of finding a cure. Although the doctors from Adelaide had stopped coming, some of the Nungkari healers from the Lands had tried to help her. Nothing had worked, not songs or herbs or calling on the power in the songlines. Then two of the healers had themselves caught the illness and died. When the child had begun to take on a distorted shape and started snapping at the last healer, the woman might have died too. Warri still remembered his shock when the old Kadaitje man had appeared as if from nowhere and he had not resisted when the man had plunged a flint knife into the brain of what had been his treasured grandchild. 

Warri still remembered how the man had looked at him with pity, something he had never seen before, then had spoken to him, another thing he had never known to happen. Normally the kadaitje did not speak, but came and went silently in their feather shoes, dispensing justice, warding the land from dangers both physical and subtle, killing by stealth or from afar when dealing death was needful. But this one had turned to him and said: “If there had been a choice I would have let her live. The thing she was becoming knew no justice, no love, only hunger, suffering and hate. She could not have infected you, you are immune to this sickness, but she would have killed you and you must not die until your proper time. The land and all the lives in it have need of you. Some other creatures are also immune, some few men and animals, perhaps as many as one in ten. I have seen no bird catch this sickness, nor any snake or lizard. The infected ones can kill them, but cannot give them the sickness. The animals that came in with the white men seem to catch it as easily as the people do, except for their cats. I have seen horses infected, and cattle, dogs and camels…..” The kadaitje man shuddered, showing more emotion than Warri had ever seen from one of his kind, then went on. “Worse, the landspirits can be infected. I saw one of the Mimi……”. 

“No, you will see it all for yourself soon enough. For now you must sing the girl’s spirit home to a safe place where she can wait to be born. Do not forget her. When people and animals start to turn into these things, they must be killed. Be careful with the blood, it can infect others, until it has been in the sun for half a day. Bright sunlight hurts the things, and can kill them - it burns them clean of the sickness. Use a blade into the brain, or crush the head. Unless they have grown armour, the bones are soft. And when you talk to Singer, be sure she knows of this. I fear that her people too can be infected. Every creature I have so far seen infected has been of one of the kinds that bear live young and feed milk to their young. Good luck. Live.” 

Without another word the kadaitje man vanished as silently as he had come.


	2. Singer's Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tale of Warri's friend.

Year 3, Very Far to the South: Singer’s Story

When she was calved, the pod had been in the Bight. Her mother had rested for a few days, nursing her calf in the rich peaceful waters, sleeping a lot, drifting in the whale-dream to speed her healing from what had been a hard birth. Friends and relatives guarded mother and daughter from sharks and other dangers drawn by the scent of blood in the waters, paused to admire the baby, sang to her so that she would know all their voices and would associate them with safety and comfort, listening to her first hesitant murmurs until they could be sure of her voice, and that they would recognise her at a distance, or in the lightless depths. 

When Singer was a few months old the pod began the journey down to the Ice. For the young whale the migration was an adventure: so many new sights and sounds, different tastes in the water, and best of all, new voices. Slowly her own song grew stronger, as she grew to be herself. She quickly learned to manage her growing body, and outgrew the awkwardness of working out how to make it act as she wished. In a few years she had become a strong and graceful adolescent, ready to leave her home pod for awhile and travel separately or with other youngsters. Then for some twenty years she wandered, learning the oceans that were her home, adventuring and exploring, meeting others of her kind and of other kindreds, learning to hunt and fight and to sing well, adding her portion to the web of song that bound her world together. 

She found her first love, and was joyful. And the year her first calf was born in the safe rich waters of the Bight she found her soul-friend. Singer had always been curious about the humans. She had watched them from the sea, had listened fascinated to the songs they sang from the cliffs, had watched their slight bodies moving in strangely beautiful rhythmic patterns, almost as if they were dancing, and had been fascinated by the tales told by her elders of their interactions with those few humans whose minds and souls could touch their own. So she was not completely unprepared when, as she floated nursing her calf and watching the sun rise, a voice reached her. The physical voice was tiny, but she understood the meaning if not the words, because the soul-voice of the human was very clear. This human was a male, young but fully grown. He stood at the very edge of the cliff, mind and body open to her, and sang. 

“Come near the edge of your world” he sang, “and talk to me”. 

Singer had never spoken with a human before, but it felt…..familiar? Right? As things should be? Without fear or hesitation, she replied: “You are at the edge of your own world, human man. I will sing to you, if you will sing to me. Will you tell me your name?”

His reply came strangely, a run of tiny sharp sounds that were obviously speech, though no speech that her body could have shaped. But his mind-voice, his soul-voice, was resonant and clear. “My name is Warri. It is a small name, and it may grow as I do. Will you tell me your name?”

“I am the one whose song is like a warm current at the edge of the Ice, the one whose song calls the pod together, the one whose song resonates in the stones, the one whose song hunters fear. It is a long name. Can you remember it?”

“I can remember it well, but this body will not allow me to sing it back to you. When I seek you out in the Dreaming I will call you so, but when I speak to you from my body I will call you Singer. It is fitting. Your voice is strong and beautiful.”

Singer and Warri remained friends their lives long.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On land and sea, the old protections of the land and its folk are reshaped, reinforced and strengthened anew to take into account the new dangers of the Post-rash era.

Year 3, Very Far to the South. Chapter 3: Warri’s Dance

When the pattern of the dance was marked out to his satisfaction, and all those concerned had been informed of what he was doing, Warri began his work. He took a moment to be sure he remembered the new pattern perfectly and then began the slow steps of his dance, guiding the magic into a spell of protection and health for the land and its inhabitants. He had tried to adapt the ancient pattern to give protection from new dangers, and was curious to see how well it had worked. He had a fascinated audience, though no other human was near. A dingo crouched close to him, on the side of the pattern away from the sea. A masked owl watched from the mouth of a nearby cave. Warri could feel Singer’s touch in his mind and soul, and felt stronger for her presence. And all around he could feel the spirits: tutelary ancestors, guardian spirits of the other lives with whom humans shared the Plain, children of the tribe waiting the time for rebirth, land-spirits of many kinds, the old dark spirits of the ancient world in the caves below the Plain, and one discordant note in their song: the new spirits, beasts and things that had once been men or the more material of the landspirits. He was afraid. But the magic needed to be renewed, so that life could continue.

He called on the dingo, an old friend whom he knew to be immune to the new disease as he himself was, on the masked owl and a big perentie lurking nearby, on a big brown snake that sometimes helped to defend him while he was working. All these creatures briefly touched his mind, then turned their attention outward as Warri began his dance. 

The intricate twists and interweavings of the wardspell were laid out in the patterns of sand he had traced on the land the night before. Now his careful steps reinforced the pattern until it took on a life of its own, rising from the ground and expanding to cover the land from the cliffs at the edge of the Bight to the Range and beyond, as far inland as the dunes and salt flats around Lake Christopher. His spell came to a slow halt there, anchoring itself in the trunks of the singing sheoaks that grew in the dry lakebeds, gripping onto the anchor points of the quartz mounds, moulding itself to the pattern of the songlines and reinforcing and strengthening their protection of the land and all its many lives. 

Through the touch of Singer’s mind and spirit he could feel that the whalemages also were dancing their pattern on the sea. Their song was louder and stronger than his, reinforcing his work as his reinforced theirs from his stronger anchorage in the physical world. Between them all, their small patch of the Bight and the Plain would be safe for another turning of the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Myrning of our time regularly renew the patterns of protection and increase on their land, and cooperate with the whales of the Bight to do so. Early anthropologists insisted that these people had 'no culture', because they built no obvious permanent structures, and their dances followed a pattern marked out on the ground in differently coloured sands, (or for really heavy-duty magic, powdered ochres) which were swept away, leaving no trace, when the dances and the magic were done.


End file.
